A pandemic paean

by Paul Kandarian

2020 HAS BEEN one of those years we want to put in the rear view and watch it careen out of control, plunge over a cliff, and explode into a fiery bouquet of a gloriously necessary incendiary end.

Like many people, I get caught up in the madness, the insanity of public opinion writ large and ugly over the screaming landscape of social media. I vow to not pay so much attention on this feed or that screed and then I watch my participatory hours silently stack up on some social media activity tracker I did not know I had, the hours, minutes, seconds of online presence creeping up, making me think that’s what it would have been like in my Catholic upbringing, those pre-atheist days, if the priest in the confessional booth of shame had a tablet that listed the sins I had actually committed or merely thought of committing.

It’s the little things that are big, and for me, slowing down to breathe is simple.

The old expression of slowing down to smell the roses is cliched but so essential. When you think of the world after the Industrial Revolution until a generation ago, how progress was slow and steady for two centuries plus – how it gave us time to acknowledge each step along the way, accept and adjust, evolve and embrace, at a workable, absorbable pace – you realize that the insane alleged accomplishments of the last couple of decades happened in the historically comparable blink of an eye.

Consider the slow slog of time that led to the battery, electricity, photography, rubber, pasteurization,vaccines for polio, mumps, chicken pox, TB, radios, fire extinguishers, elevators, the telephone, the telegraph, the teletype, anesthesia, x-rays, MRIs, radios, jet engines, dishwashers, television, frozen food, planes, trains and automobiles and digitized lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Now consider the last 20 years: The Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, AI, buying without setting foot in a store or interacting with a human, laptop computers, electronic books, electric cars, 200 channels and nothing to watch, intuitive, intrusive algorithms that know us better than we know us, iPhones, iPods, iEverything, Me Me Me What About ME?!?

Then and now. It’s like going from preparing a days-long Thanksgiving feast to cooking a three-minute egg in 3 seconds. It is scary and it is real. And no one has control over how we deal with that. Except us. It’s the little things that are big, and for me, slowing down to breathe is simple. For one thing, every day I open the newspaper (they still exist) and take 20 minutes to do the crossword and drink coffee. No TV, no news, no distractions. Just me, my pen, my mind. My late mother did crosswords every day and continued even after getting Alzheimer’s. She died before the cruel finality of that disease completely devoured her beautiful mind, and I think doing crosswords helped immensely.

I love to cook (another gift from my mom) and nothing is more relaxing than racing madly about the kitchen, timing dishes especially when cooking for guests – no TV, no news, no distractions – who appreciate what I crank out. I’ve always been creating and cooking is amazingly creative.

Getting into the woods (got that from my dad) to hike and forage. I’ve been into hiking since I quit smoking four years ago, and vowed to stay healthy. The pounds have crept up since then but it would be worse if I didn’t get out into the woods, the fresh air, hot or cold, and just move. And in the last few months I’ve taken to foraging mushrooms, which many feel is dangerous, but not if you educate yourself to make sure what you take to eat is safe. I also take extracts of certain mushrooms designed to alleviate inflammation and arthritis and find them powerfully effective.

But by far, the most relaxing and rewarding thing I do is spend time with my grandson, now nearly six, a nonstop whirlwind of energy, imagination, love, and sincerity. I don’t see him nearly as often as I’d like but just the mere thought of him slowly spreads a smile across my face before I even know it’s there. Like now, writing this.

I’ve gotten him off the bus lately to help his working mom out, and those hours we have are precious and few, simple and sublime. Recently, we were together and he spotted a noisy carwash, insisting we go through. We made a great adventure of it, screaming at the madly swishing sudsy strands of cloth, imagining them to be snakes, the whirling orange brushes becoming savage aliens, all intent on eating our car and us. He vacuumed my car later, proclaiming of the messy interior, “Grandpa, you’re like a hoarder.”

Then in a heartwarming reminder of what’s truly important, when I told him his mother was going to get him a pizza for later even though he just ate, he said, “It’s okay, Mommy might be hungry and it can be for the family.”

And just before I could melt into a teary proud Grandpa puddle, he added dramatically, “Because that’s what the man does” with a wave of his hand, adding impeccable comic timing to his repertoire of insanely cute behavior.

2020 is gone soon, but not forgotten. And hopefully unwittingly imparting to us all the lesson that sometimes you gotta work at your own sanity. But it is so worth it. The year doesn’t matter. How we handle it is all that does.